DETROIT — The recount would indeed show that the election had been a mess, there had been many mistakes in reporting the results, and that the Republican candidate who had been declared the winner in Michigan … had really lost.

Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, this isn’t a story about this year’s election and Donald Trump. But a statewide recount did overturn the result in 1950, when G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams was running for re-election to a second two-year term.

That was then a story that transfixed the national media — and kept Michigan in suspense for weeks. If that wasn’t enough, it happened again two years later, when Mr. Williams once again prevailed in a cliffhanger race after a recount.

However, that doesn’t mean that would be the case with a recount this time. In fact, the opposite is almost certainly true.

Michigan now has what is probably one of the nation’s cleanest and most reliable vote counting and reporting operations. While there may be some small errors when nearly 5 million votes are tabulated, they are remarkably few.

Back in 2000, Mike Rogers, a Lansing-area Republican, ended up narrowly winning the closest congressional race in the country that year, edging Democrat Dianne Byrum by only 160 votes out of more than 290,000 cast.

That was a far closer margin, in percentage terms, than Mr. Trump’s statewide margin of 10,704 votes this year. Ms. Byrum asked for a full recount, and one began.

She gained a handful of votes, but it was soon clear that not enough would change to give her victory. Before the recount could be finished, she conceded defeat.

“We have a good system to some extent because we were forced to make changes and fix it,” a spokesman for the Michigan secretary of state told me at the time.

Make changes, that is, because of the 1950 embarrassment. That election was one for the record books.

As Thomas Noer recounts in his well-written 2005 biography Soapy, Mr. Williams had been the first Democratic governor of Michigan in years, and Republicans were gunning for him. Election Day was harsh and rainy in much of the state, something that usually serves to hurt Democratic turnout.

The lead changed hands throughout the night, but in the end, Republican Harry Kelly, himself a former governor, appeared to have won by about 3,000 votes.

But Democratic operatives in the field heard reports of errors — particularly in always volatile Macomb County — and urged the 39-year-old governor not to concede defeat.

Recounts, then and now, cost money, and the candidate was expected to pay $22,000 for it — the equivalent of roughly $200,000 today. In a humiliating blow, Mr. Williams turned to his mother, who was wealthy, but she was a Republican and refused to help her son out.

Desperate, the Democrats called for volunteers to work on the recount —and lobby the state to hold one without charging the candidate. Labor unions mobilized their troops. Schoolteachers and academics turned out to help supervise and monitor the process.

Soon, they started finding evidence of horrendous mistakes. A referendum having to do with the legalization of margarine, of all things, was on the ballot, and in Macomb County, votes for the spread had mistakenly been counted as votes for the Republican candidate.

In Oakland County, Mr. Williams was found to have lost 500 votes when a “9” was accidentally called in as a “4.” Faced with these and other egregious errors, the Board of State Canvassers waived the fee, and a statewide recount began.

Soon, Mr. Williams was ahead by 1,154 votes, and gaining with almost every recounted precinct. When two-thirds of the state had been recounted, Republicans finally gave up.

The embarrassing errors led to intense efforts to move the state from old-fashioned paper ballots to voting machines. Two years later, there was another close race. (Governors served two-year terms until 1966, when they became four years.)

Soapy Williams finished a scant 7,500 votes ahead in 1952, and this time, Republicans requested a recount. Far fewer errors were found in that year’s tallies, however, and once again, the Democrats gained slightly.

Soapy Williams would go on to be elected three more times, but by large margins that didn’t invite recounts.

Michigan’s last brush with electile dysfunction came in 1970, when Detroit tried a punch-card voting system similar to the one that caused the disaster in Florida in 2000.

Except in Michigan, it was worse. Election workers put the punch cards in the machine — which promptly broke down and would neither count nor give up the ballots.

Technicians were summoned, but they too failed. Eventually, the machines were taken apart, and the punch cards, hanging chads and all, were counted by hand.

Three days later, incumbent Bill Milliken was certified the winner by 44,000 votes. The result may have been closer, though; some say that with the chaos going on at county election headquarters that night, some workers left, took their boxes of ballots home — and never brought them back.

Nothing like that has happened since, and the state now uses an optically scanned paper ballot. Elections officials I trust say they can’t imagine any sizable error, and I believe them.

But then again, nearly everybody was sure five weeks ago that Hillary Clinton would win the state.

Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade’s ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan. Contact him at:omblade@aol.com.

First Published December 9, 2016, 5:00 a.m.